Voltaire's style reaches the summit of its perfection in _Candide_; but
it is perfect in all that he wrote. His prose is the final embodiment of
the most characteristic qualities of the French genius. If all that that
great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world,
except a single sentence of Voltaire's, the essence of their achievement
would have survived. His writing brings to a culmination the tradition
that Pascal had inaugurated in his _Lettres Provinciales_: clarity,
simplicity and wit--these supreme qualities it possesses in an
unequalled degree. But these qualities, pushed to an extreme, have also
their disadvantages. Voltaire's style is narrow; it is like a
rapier--all point; with such neatness, such lightness, the sweeping
blade of Pascal has become an impossibility. Compared to the measured
march of Bossuet's sentences, Voltaire's sprightly periods remind one
almost of a pirouette. But the pirouette is Voltaire's--executed with
all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate
dancer; it would be folly to complain; yet it was clear that a reaction
was bound to follow--and a salutary reaction. Signs of it were already
visible in the colour and passion of Diderot's writing; but it was not
until the nineteenth century that the great change came.

Nowhere is the excellence of Voltaire's style more conspicuous than in
his Correspondence, which forms so large and important a portion of his
work. A more delightful and a more indefatigable letter-writer never
lived. The number of his published letters exceeds ten thousand; how
many more he may actually have written one hardly ventures to imagine,
for the great majority of those that have survived date only from the
last thirty years of his long life. The collection is invaluable alike
for the light which it throws upon Voltaire's career and character, and
for the extent to which it reflects the manners, sentiments, and thought